


Waltz

by if420fireflies



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Hogwarts Sixth Year, M/M, Oneshot, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:08:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26133211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/if420fireflies/pseuds/if420fireflies
Summary: Draco dated Harry Potter for three years, from year two to four. But now it’s sixth year, and Draco Malfoy is still haunted by threes. The three initials of a forgotten name, the three ingredients of Angel’s Trumpet Draught. Three Black sisters, three corpses in the coils of Nagini’s tail. Three words Harry used to say.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 2
Kudos: 36





	Waltz

**Author's Note:**

> No beta we die like men. I thank you for your attention in advance.

It’s been a bad day. Bad week. Bad month, really. Day, week, month. Draco listens to his own mind as it chants the three syllables again. Day, week, month. He’s tempted to laugh.

Today, he’d failed a Potions test. His best subject. Slughorn had given him an Acceptable anyway, but the Draught of Angel’s Trumpet had been unpleasantly thick within his cauldron. He knows he should have failed. Last week, he received a letter from his father, inquiring about the progress on his mission. A task that Draco is the worst candidate for. Draco had replied immediately and truthfully, informing his father that the operation was going smoothly. He’d successfully snuck the cursed necklace into Hogwarts. Two weeks before that, last month, his mother’s roses wilted. Narcissa Malfoy was brilliant at Herbology, and it was probably the first time a plant died in her care. Voldemort and Nagini had arrived in Malfoy Manor. 

Back in the present, Draco looks at his drawn reflection in the prefect bathroom mirror. Drawn, drawn, drawn, his mind sings delightedly. Mirror, mirror, mirror.

And maybe it’s because everything is backward, because he fails his favourite subject but succeeds where he is weak and unwilling. Because the innocent flowers of the Manor and the snake beneath them are now one and the same. All facades are truth now. That’s why when he sees Harry Potter in the mirror, like the lost child of an insubstantial ghost, he doesn’t move. Ghost, ghost, ghost. Potter, Potter, Potter. 

Since everything is backwards, maybe saying Harry’s name three times will make him disappear instead of appear.

But Draco doesn’t speak. And because everything is backwards, when Harry walks softly towards him, Draco doesn’t turn away or draw his wand. When Harry says “Show me your arm,” Draco rolls up his sleeve obligingly. There’s poetry in Harry now, in the way he moves and speaks and exists. Harry, so rough and practical, is now a sonnet to Draco. And Draco isn’t much at all. Potter, Potter, Harry.

Harry takes Draco’s bare wrist in his hand, and traces over the dark lines that now occupy his skin there. There’s no accusation in his face, or shock, or pain, even though there’s no way he could have known for sure.

Draco remembers when Harry used to touch his wrists just as tenderly, in hidden corridors and dusty classrooms, in second and third and fourth year. Harry touched all of him, then, when Draco was his. Ankles, calves, stomach, back, hair, eyes, hands. But now, all Draco gets is Harry’s fingertips on the short lines of the Dark Mark. For a horrible second, Draco wants the lines to be a little longer, the scars a little deeper, so that he could have that much more time with Harry’s fingers tracing along them.

Draco ended things with Harry in September of fifth year. The son of Lucius Malfoy, always on the winning side, could not be with Harry Potter. And now it’s sixth year, and everything is wrong. Sometimes he wonders if everything would be alright if he’d stayed with Harry. Other times he wonders if losing Harry was simply a natural consequence of everything becoming its reflection. Roses to snakes, Outstanding’s to Troll’s, Harry to Potter.

Harry is still holding Draco’s wrist. He looks into Draco’s eyes again, looking for something. But he’ll find nothing much there. He might as well look into a mirror, he’d learn more about Draco from one of those. When Harry walks out, Draco will go back to fighting him, wearing away at him, making him cry when he’s alone in the scant privacy provided by dorm curtains and a Muffliato charm. Draco doesn’t mind the work. Right is wrong. But the stars have seen fit to give him one last time, in this clean quiet prefect’s bathroom. Time, time, time. Potter, Harry, my love.

Yes, he’s been hurting Potter. Insulting him, distracting him, using what’s left of his affection for Draco to catch him off-balance. If exploiting the remains of a schoolyard romance will keep his mother safer, he’ll do it! He’s not a monster. Schoolyard, monster, romance, his mind recites.

In the beginning, Harry had told him all the little things. The little things you say, not realizing they’re all lies until years after. Draco remembers three of them.

“I’d do anything for you,” Harry had said, one day, as they sprawled across the docks of the lake, both of them covered by the Invisibility Cloak. Better to not be seen.

“Don’t be stupid, Draco, I could never really hate you,” he’d said on Draco’s birthday. A year later, when Draco broke up with him, he told Draco he despised him and his cowardice and everything else. But it was unfair to compare the beginning to the end.

“I want you,” Harry had said, constantly, whenever he thought Draco wasn’t sure, or even just for the sake of saying it. He had been like that, the thoughts spilling from his tongue and teeth, thoughts that were repetitive whenever they were about his love for Draco. 

But now, as they stand in the prefect bathroom, the light shining off of Harry’s Quidditch Captain badge, Draco finds Harry to be unreadable. Harry pulls Draco’s sleeve back over his hand, then walks to the door like a ghost. Is he thinking about the roles they’ll play when they leave this bathroom? Does he wonder if Draco, after all this, still plans on hurting him? He must know this moment was a transitory plane, a grey line, not a real place. Of course Draco will hurt him. But then, Potter turns around and smiles at Draco. There are tears on his face, Draco realizes. How long have they been there?

He wishes Harry would come back and hug him. Before this bubble of time ends. He wants to hear those little lies again, all three of them. He wants to apologize for everything, to explain why, but Harry probably already knows why. He wishes that he'd go to Harry and hug him.

But the door swings shut behind Potter. The patch of faint light on the bathroom tile dwindles. Darker, darker, dark, dark. Potter, Harry, Draco’s love, and a sixth-year who withered along with his mother’s roses.

He’s crying too, now. He pulls the vial of his misbrewed Angel’s Trumpet Draught out of his pocket. It is said that potions gone wrong have the opposite effect. He downs the whole thing in four swallows. There is work to be done. Work, work, work, _work._

He has stolen one last dance from the stars, but the time for waltzing is over. No more threes, because war drums beat in four. Deformed, sad, spineless, lame. Draco can finally be happy in a winter of discontent.

If music is the food of love, it can shut the hell up.

**Author's Note:**

> I've tried to edit through this so many times I no longer have objective understanding of it, so please tell me what you think! 
> 
> Trying to develop as many mental complexes as possible so that I have content to write about for psychology courses. Kudos and criticism are much appreciated, because then I could simultaneously acquire superiority and inferiority complexes. If anyone could find a way to be permanently damaged by this fic, that would be fantastic because then I could round off the set with a guilt complex.
> 
> Thanks for reading and sorry about the Shakespeare references!


End file.
